[Below, Lyons distinguishes between "Rent the phenomenon and Rent the show," claiming that the production's "artlessness is a sophisticated achievement."]

There's Rent the phenomenon and Rent the show. The phenomenon: Limousines and taxis snake through East Fourth Street, a strip of tenements and bodegas, toward the New Theater Workshop, where the new musical is the town's toast. It's an updating of Puccini's La Boheme, which, exactly a century ago, celebrated the defiant struggles of Paris bohemians. Composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson (his earlier, misfired satire on Wall Street, J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation, was actually staged on Wall Street) transposed it all to the grungy East Village—a few blocks or so east of the theater. Now, in a plot development right out of its own story, it's to move uptown in late April, but only to a theater on the lower outskirts of that co-opting entity called Broadway. It will forsake its 150-seat home for a 1206-seat space: it will be eligible for uptown awards: commercial temptations will assail it. There's irony, of course, in the quick embrace of rebelliousness by celebrity, but Rent, in truth, begs to be embraced: it's a good boy at heart. The saddest irony of all is that, on the very eve of glory, on the evening of the last dress rehearsal, Larson, 35, died suddenly and shockingly of an aneurysm.

Rent the show: If your heart sinks at the phrase "rock musical," buck up, for Rent does not belong to that dreary, hybrid litter. Almost 30 years ago Hair was supposed to have revolutionized the musical by wedding it to rock, but it was a shotgun and short-lived union. Hair now seems stupidly complacent and sounds not unlike the Partridge Family. Rent is a musical, one influenced by many styles including rock and reggae and salsa and tango and opera, but Larson was a protege of Stephen Sondheim, the bringer of psychological complexity and literate doubt to the form, and that's the tradition it works in—and surpasses. It's the best new musical since the 1950s, the time of Leonard Bernstein's Candide and John Latouche's The Golden Apple. Director Michael Greif (he did a vivid, complex Pericles at the Public a while back) has had a lot to do with the clarity, the force, the crisp definition with which Rent presents itself. It flaunts the bareness and spareness: bare stage, granite blocks, stylized Christmas tree, bandstand stage right at which the five musicians in black casually assemble. It's as if we're about to see a rehearsal, and what we do experience has the raw, ragged, slightly unfinished, excited, urgent feel of a late but coalescing run-through: This seeming artlessness is a sophisticated achievement.

There's no book; some 35 songs, sung by 15 young singers, propel the story, which is indeed stronger in emotion than narrative, as it follows the vicissitudes of a band of artists in and around an East Village squat. It's Christmas, and our roommate heroes, filmmaker Mark (Puccini's poet Rodolfo) and songwriter Roger (Puccini's painter Marcello), can't pay the rent to their new yuppie landlord, who wants to turn the building into a cyberspace for artists. Mark has lost his performance-artist girlfriend Maureen (Puccini's Musetta) to soundwoman Joanne. During a power outage Mimi comes to Roger looking for a match: he's an ex-junkie; she's a junkie; it's love at first squint, but a shadowed love, for both are HIV-pos as they find out later, only when their AZT beepers go off simultaneously.

Maureen's performance-piece protest song about Elsie the Cow in Cyberland sparks a riot, which Mark films so brilliantly that he's offered a network job. Uptown, Faustian temptations beckon our downtown rebels. The Roger-Mimi romance stalls as she goes back on the needle and he splits for healthy Santa Fe.

It's in the intimate but charged personal songs that Rent excels, as when Mark and Joanne share the pains of loving an egoist in "Tango Maureen" or when Roger paints his musical vision in "Glory" or Roger and Mimi exchange "Light My Candle" and "I Should Tell You." What Mr. Larson knew so well and Mr. Greif stages so electrically is that each song must contain and enact a conflict. Every minute of Rent is energized by polarized pain; someone's constantly in someone else's face. Under Mr. Greif's no-frills direction and Marlies Yearby's bare-knuckles choreography, bare tables are sites of conflict, and microphones are vessels of rage. This is no smug, Hair-like celebration of a culture, but an angry anatomizing of a culture's internal and external stresses. "This is not Bohemia, but Calcutta," in the words of "La Vie Boheme," the exultant, choric first-act finale that proclaims allegiance to icons like [filmmaker Michelangelo] Antonioni, [Bernardo] Bertolucci and the Sex Pistols even as those mortal beepers beep. The second half brings tragedy, recrimination and a final, paradoxically life-affirming resurrection of Mimi.

There are flaws, and large ones: There's a transvestite named Angel whose love for an NYU prof and death from AIDS is supposed to be a key moral anchor for everyone, but the character is barely there and is a cliche at that: even Mimi, with her relapses, is largely unexplained: the Christmas ironies are trite: much plot is literally inaudible. But who cares? So much fresh air blows through Rent! If Sunset Boulevard was the twilight of the old musical and Victor/Victoria its midnight, if Sondheim's sterile cleverness has proved a dead end, this is both smart and alive.

Daphne Rubin-Vega's Mimi has spunk and poignancy. Fredi Walker and Idina Menzel are terrific as Joanne and Maureen; they've got a wonderful number together, "Take Me or Leave Me." (One of Rent's cheerful virtues is its eagerness to cast players of color in a lifelike, but still surprising variety of roles: Ms. Walker's Joanne is a good guy, but Taye Diggs's yuppie landlord is perhaps not.) Ms. Menzel's show-stopping sing-along ode to Elsie is hilarious. Rent likes to laugh at itself. Central are the vocal-dramatic performances of Adam Pascal as Roger—he's an actual musician and gets exactly their solipsistic intensity—and of Anthony Rapp as the hot, angry idealist Mark. Alert and savage, with presence to burn, Mr. Rapp runs through the show like a jolt of illicitly hooked-up electricity.